Secure group communications over combined wired and wireless networks

This paper considers the fundamental problem of key agreement among a group of parties communicating over an insecure public network. Over the years, a number of solutions to this problem have been proposed with varying degrees of complexity. However, there seems to have been no previous systematic look at the growing problem of key agreement over combined wired and wireless networks, consisting of both high-performance computing machines and low-power mobile devices. In this paper we present an efficient group key agreement scheme well suited for this networking environment. Our construction is intuitively simple, and yet offers a scalable solution to the problem.